Hello
You ask me to ring in about two weeks for that review of Goin ape?
It’s a kind Greek version of the Hebrew Hammer/meets Nick Zedd… But with less tact. I made myself up to look like a knob and in no way is the character the real me. The 2016 version online is best to watch. I had no real money to make the film. I put 3g from my pocket, 15g from CALQ, 5000$ in services from main film and 2g came from one of the actors who felt I should have been hired as an animator yrs ago but I’m still not working.
Regrettably the lead actress lost her battle with cancer this past weekend but her husband and kids will be able to read the review.
Cheers to you.
Toly AK
Buckle up, weird road ahead. The IMDB description of Goin’ Ape is ”out of work painter is driven over the edge when he stumbles on a teen porn ring,” which is the only way I know that. The experience of the film is a chaotic dream-state stream of consciousness from a filmmaker trying to express something like frustration or existential rage. Or maybe he had a bad burrito the night before. Impossible to say.
Firstly, lets get past what this film is not: it’s not a traditional movie with a three-act narrative arc. It’s not polished, nor particularly coherent. The sound is uneven and muddy. The videography is shaky. The edits in the piece jump and jar the viewer in the poorly executed cuts and the soundtrack growls with dark fuzzy death-ish metal guitar sounds. This is more of a personal explosion of ideas and expression than anything else. We get quite a few of these submissions to review and try to cover as many as possible, because, frankly, this is about as “indie” as it gets. Point. Shoot. Save. Publish. Respect. F**k iMovie, editing is for p*****s.
This is a film so full of strangeness you have to wonder in a shrinking world where this entropy comes from. Well, wonder no more, it comes from Canadian artist and filmmaker Apostoly Kouroumalis.
“…something like frustration or existential rage…”
The Ape, or just “Ape” in the movie is played by Kouroumalis himself. He stumbles and fights and snarls his way through 50 leather-jacketed minutes of insanity, incoherently screaming about the events inside the film and about making the film, often looking straight into the camera. This is a fascinating declaration of… well… something. The rating is a shrug, an absolute surrender to the notion that the value of some art is only in what the individual viewer takes away from it. The link below is to the entire film. Vaya con Dios!
Share your impressions in the comments…
Goin’ Ape (2016). Written and directed by Toly Kouroumalis. Starring Toly Kouroumalis, Genvieve DiSalvo, Mike DiSalvo.
5 out of 10
https://youtu.be/wUjOBXCH8ew?t=1
